The Opt-Out Revolution

Published: October 26, 2003

(Page 4 of 9)

That Sears and Brokaw were schooled in different generations is made clear by the different ways they gave up their jobs. Sears took nine years to quit. And she did so with great regret. ''I would have hung in there, except the days kept getting longer and longer,'' she explains. ''My five-day 50-hour week was becoming a 60-hour week.'' As news reports could be transmitted farther and farther from the ''mother ship,'' she found herself an hour or two from home when the nightly news was done. ''Will was growing up, and I was driving home from a fire,'' she says. ''I knew there would always be wrecks and fires, but there wouldn't always be his childhood.''

First she tried to reduce her schedule. ''The station would not give me a part-time contract,'' she says. ''They said it was all or nothing.'' So in August 2000, she walked away from her six-figure income and became a homeroom mom at her son's school.

''It was wrenching for me to leave Channel 2,'' she says. ''I miss being the lioness in the newsroom -- to walk through and have the interns say, 'There she goes.' It kills me that I'm not contributing to my 401(k) anymore. I do feel somehow that I let the cause down.''

Brokaw, while torn about leaving, did so without nearly as much guilt or angst as Sears. She did not think for a moment that she had failed the movement, though she did wonder whether she had failed herself. Even while she was preparing for her trial she raised the possibility of a part-time schedule. She wrote a proposal that was circulated among the partners, and some back-and-forth had begun about, among other things, whether reduced hours would count as time toward partnership.

''Every once in a while I would raise my head from the grind of getting this case ready and I would say, 'Where are we with my proposal?''' she remembers. ''Finally, when the case was pulled from the calendar, I did a lot of soul-searching. My life, my home life and my new family life were at the mercy of other people's whims. The judge had chosen to go fishing. My partners had chosen not to place my request on high-enough priority.''

One night she and her husband sat down, and he asked, ''What is the ultimate goal?''

''In theory,'' she answered, ''the goal is to become a partner.''

''Does your life get better or worse if you become a partner?''

''Well, financially it gets better, but in terms of my actual life, it gets worse.''

And that is when Brokaw quit. She now cares full time for that eldest daughter, as well as the two children who followed. ''I wish it had been possible to be the kind of parent I want to be and continue with my legal career,'' she says, ''but I wore myself out trying to do both jobs well.''

Fast-forward a decade, and compare the decision that Brokaw, class of '82, made with that of Vicky McElhaney Benedict, class of '91. ''Even before I became a mother, I suspected I wouldn't go back to work,'' she says.

The Princeton Benedict entered was on its way to complete coeducation, and, she says, ''I never felt discriminated against in any way.'' From there she went to Duke University School of Law, where she met her future husband, who was there earning his M.B.A. A native of Dallas, she ''had fabulous offers from firms back home, but I didn't take them,'' she says. Though not yet engaged, she decided to follow Charlie Benedict to Atlanta instead, ''where I joined a law firm that was not as high-profile.'' She made the choice, she says, looking back on it, ''because I knew that the long-term career was going to be his.''

The couple were married in 1995. Benedict quit her law job after nine months and began working in the development office of Emory University. Her daughter was born in 1998, and she quit that job while on maternity leave. Her son was born three years later, and she says she is secure with her decision.

''This is what I was meant to do,'' she says. ''I hate to say that because it sounds like I could have skipped college. But I mean this is what I was meant to do at this time. I know that's very un-p.c., but I like life's rhythms when I'm nurturing a child.

''I've had people tell me that it's women like me that are ruining the workplace because it makes employers suspicious,'' she continues. ''I don't want to take on the mantle of all womanhood and fight a fight for some sister who isn't really my sister because I don't even know her.''

These are fighting words of a most retro sort, and, no doubt, a 70's feminist peering in the window would be confused at best and depressed at worst. But unmapped roads are not, de facto, dead ends. Is this a movement that failed, or one reborn? What does this evolving spectrum of demands and choices tell us about women? And what does it mean for the future?

atherine Brokaw and I were classmates. We did not know one another well at school, but the Princeton she describes was the one that I knew too. We were told we could be anything then, which we took to mean we could do everything, and all of it at the same time. We felt powerful and privileged when it came to being women (and, let's face it, only during freshman year did we learn to actually call ourselves women). Any generalization is dangerous, but for the most part we didn't feel the same obligation to succeed as the women before us, nor were we bordering on blase, like those who would follow.